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Ascendant.com (previously known as just Ascendant) advertises itself as the world’s first adaption shooter, claiming to shake up each match with game-changing events. And although the squad-based shooter is good–I think it might even have the capacity to be great–it doesn’t seem to deliver what’s advertised on the tin. At its core, Ascendant.com feels like a solid shooter with an engaging capture-the-flag gameplay loop, but the various in-match events I experienced didn’t impact the flow of the game to the extent that I needed to change up my strategy between games. Ascendant.com has all the markings of being a good time but doesn’t seem to be all that different from any existing squad-based first-person shooter out there.
Each match of Ascendant.com puts you into a team of three and tasks your squad with hunting down one of the various biocores scattered about its map. While hunting these cores down, you can take the time to complete optional objectives–kill hapless wildlife to earn in-match currency, for example, or discover spawn points that will allow you or your allies to get back into a fight faster. It’s up to you whether you prefer to run straight for one of the various biocores or spend time outfitting yourself in case you run into one of the opposing teams. Once your team has successfully nabbed a biocore, you have to make the long walk back to your squad’s original spawn point, where you will defend the biocore for several minutes while it extracts. The team with the most biocores extracted at the end of the match wins.
There’s an entertaining cat-and-mouse dynamic to this set-up that feels reminiscent of The Finals or other extraction-focused shooters. Your team can choose to be aggressive and go for the closest biocore, play it safe and only go for a biocore once most teams are fighting over a different one, or let other teams handle the heavy lifting and simply steal a biocore from a weakened team. There are a lot of ways to go about completing your objective, and I had just as much fun raucously laughing at my helpless victims as I beat a biocore out of their hands as I did sneaking through a hallway with bated breath on our way to the next biocore.
But the matches I played didn’t feel distinct from one another like I had been led to believe going into the preview. There were changes to be sure–the first match featured consoles from which teams could summon air strikes on certain positions, for instance, while the second match featured an underground tunnel that connected a few previously separate areas. But I ran the same kit match-to-match and the strategy that worked pretty well in the first game kept working.
Granted, I only saw a few permutations of what Ascendant.com has to offer, so it’s possible the other variations could be far more drastic. Though I didn’t see them, I heard about some of the others that the game will have at launch, like the Burrower: a house-sized turtle-looking creature that moves like a gopher through the map and bursts up to surprise squads at random. And though that sounds pretty cool, I still wish my first time with an adaption shooter had featured more of these opportunities where I was forced to adapt.
As is, I think Ascendant.com can make a splash in the already overcrowded shooter market. There’s a decent variety of firearms and weapons already in the game–ranging from precise sniper rifles to hard-hitting shotguns and elemental-imbued gauntlets–and the time-to-kill is long enough to keep firefights interesting without prolonging into grueling shootouts. There’s a punchy, almost arcade-like sensation to each fight where broken shields shatter with a satisfying crack and defeated enemies burst into colorful loot like overstuffed pinatas.
I also love how holding a biocore unlocks enhanced abilities, like a fiery area-of-effect burst or an explosive leap, giving the players who are holding them a fighting chance against the repeated assassination attempts from other teams. As Ascendant.com is not a hero shooter, there’s no way to know what you’re going up against until it hits you, creating an underlying sense of tension in every encounter with another team. There were quite a few moments where my squad decided it might just be better to hide and let the other team pass us by, not wanting to risk potentially going up against something we might not be prepared for. And although this is a form of adaptation, it’s one that’s already present in a lot of other shooters.
Is Ascendant.com going to tear me away from Apex Legends, the shooter that’s already dominating my life? Maybe. I think it has a shot. It’s mechanically sound, features fun biopunk narrative flavor, and embodies both the hectic chaos of a heated match of capture-the-flag and the rewarding tension of an extraction shooter. But its main draw–that each match features such grand changes that your team needs to adapt how you play constantly–feels a bit lacking right now. The adjustments that exist, or at least the ones I got to see, don’t seem to transform the battlefield substantially. If developer PlayFusion puts further emphasis on these match-changing adaptations, I think Ascendant.com has a chance of breaking through the noise. Otherwise, I think it will be a good but not great shooter.
Ascendant.com is set to launch for PC. On Steam, the game is listed as “coming soon.”
